A Million Little Failures

She stands, she hovers, arm extended, invisible particles of sea salt falling to the carpeted floor. Eyes bright, hopeful, she shakes her hand.

A silent offering.

I glance up from my computer screen, finish typing the sentence I have in my head before I lose it.

‘Would you like one?’ she questions tentatively, waving the Miss Vickie’s chip bag in front of me.

I wrinkle my nose.

‘No thanks,’ I reply.

The arm falls, the bag crinkles in her hand as she bunches up the top of it. She smiles a sad smile, turns and leaves my office.

I watch her go and I immediately I begin to feel badly.

My co-worker is on a diet. Of sorts. We cheer her on as she measures out her teaspoon of salad dressing at lunch and look the other way as the cookie cupboard is mysteriously raided in the afternoon.

I realized that her offering me part of her already guilt-ridden snack was in actual fact, a request for an accomplice to a little failure. A plea to share the pinprick of shame; to make it somehow seem not so bad.

We all fail. In a million little ways, we fail. We fail ourselves, our friends, our families, our co-workers; strangers.

The other day, in the locker room of my gym, a middle-aged woman, relatively new to the club, stands on an electronic scale for an agonizing, five full minutes. She leans slowly to her left side; re-balances to the right. She steps off, removes the elastic band from her graying hair, shakes it out and steps back on again. Frowns. Leans forward. With a final sigh, she steps down.

No one says a word. No one, myself included, says what should have been said to that woman. That it’s OK. That she is beautiful anyway. That she looks healthy. That her skin is rosy, that her smile is bright. That she is a woman and she is radiant.

And most importantly, that the scale on the other side of the room weighs you in at five pounds less.



You phone a girlfriend at two in the afternoon on a Saturday.

‘Hey hon, how’s it going? What are you doing?’

‘Drinking a glass of wine and watching my roommate make my bed.’

‘You ok?’

(Laughs) ‘Why, because it’s two in the afternoon and I’m drinking or because I wasn’t able to make my own bed and my roommate is doing it for me?’

‘Well, you know. Either.’

You’re in a food court, trying to manipulate a piece of sushi in and successfully out of an impossibly small plastic cup of Soya sauce. A woman, standing in line for a piece of pizza, is holding a roughly eight-month old baby girl who is screaming with fierce determination. The child’s face is red and angry; she is pushing with all her force against her tired, frazzled mother. The woman tries to shush her. Rocks her. Tries to give her a bottle. A Pacifier. The child screams and then screams louder. Finally, in a moment of pure frustration, the mother looks into her child’s face and screams back.

A man you care about, a man you care about a lot, tells you he’s sorry, that he’s really sorry, that he can’t. That he’s failed you; that he’s failed her. Tells you he’d like it if you understood, but that it isn’t really necessary at this point in time.

We all fail. In a million little ways, we fail. But I find, that as I bumble along, that it’s the failures in people that make them human. It’s the failures in people that I like.